Vulnerability and Trash: Divisions Within Stucky Fandom
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Vulnerability and Trash Divisions within the Stucky fandom Alen Ríos and Diego Rivera Abstract In this article we focus on the construction of the Other within the Stucky fandom. Contemporary fandoms are spaces that have been conceived as homogenous, or communities in which differences are not seen. Moreover, they are an articulation of subjectivities that encompass and allow several mechanisms of governmentality; they can be capitalized upon and exploited, but also produce their own logics of resistance. This paper analyzes how certain fanworks and fan practices on the social network Tumblr constitute an Other in relation to the general fandom of Stucky. The methodology used was a virtual ethnographic approach using participant observation and ethnographic interviews. According to our results, the Stucky fandom utilizes trigger warnings as a political rationality to construe a vulnerable Other in order to prevent and warn about activities, topics, or experiences that may heavily upset them, as well as converging in the creation of a segregation of those experiences via tags. This phenomenon also occurs in the parts (sides ad verbatim) of fandom that do not move or uphold the same values or hegemonic perspectives within the fandom, generating an Other that should be moderated. We suggest framing and understanding these practices as power relationships that are constantly changing, due to the platforms, the fans and the discourses that surround them. Therefore, divisions and othering in fandom should be understood as a contingent product of relationships both inside and outside the fandom. Keywords Otherness, fandom, slash, ethicopolitics, trigger warnings Otherness: Essays and Studies Volume 6 · Number 1 · December 2018 © The Author 2018. All rights reserved. Vulnerability and Trash Divisions within the Stucky fandom Alen Ríos and Diego Rivera1 Introduction Fandom studies initiated as a subsection of audience studies (Roque 2015), understanding fandom as a community of fanatics, an irrational and pathological mass with an illogical affection for some form of popular culture (Jenkins in Meyan & Tucker 2007). Or as Stanfill (2011) puts it, fans and nerds in general were framed as a form of failed white masculinity: they appeared as childish, feminized bodies unable to perform their expected role, needing to outgrow their hobbies to be able to do so. These notions were challenged in 1992 by Henry Jenkins, who proposed thinking about fandom not as a pathological activity, but as a communal activity that allowed the articulation of discourses outside of the hegemonic mainstream (Jenkins 2005). This was followed by studies done by academics researching the field as fans, mixing both their role of academic and fans, as “acafans”, increasing the complexity of their studies (Jenkins in Meyan & Tucker 2007). From there, fandom studies expanded from the conception of fandom as only an activity of resistance, exploring its heterogeneous nature and the ways it relates to hegemony, 1 The authors would like to eagerly thank Baird Campbell ([email protected]), candidate to Ph.D. in Anthropology at Rice University, who generously proofread our manuscript, helping us to edit our article. Otherness: Essays and Studies Volume 6 · Number 1 · December 2018 © The Author 2018. All rights reserved. Vulnerability and Trash Alen Ríos and Diego Rivera and they also changed with the gradual decline of stigmatization of fandom and its growing role in the entertainment industry (Roque 2015). At the same time, the organization of fandom was reshaped with the widespread use of the Internet, taking the already virtual communities of fandom and settling in new sites that allowed larger communities and a new form of synchronicity (Jenkins 2006). This movement allowed new forms of organization. For example, in the South Korean fandom, it gave rise to new forms of cyber-activism organized by fans both in charitable drives and the moral policing of both stars and other fans (Sun 2012). The term fandom is a neologism that combines the word fan and the suffix dom (Reid 2012; Roine 2013) and can be defined as a community of fans working with reciprocal sharing around a specific narrative work (Turk 2014), as a community who “understands” the fanworks related to a given product (Stanfill 2013), amongst other definitions. Production is one of its central dimensions (Fiske 1992). For Jenkins ([1992] 2005), fandom appears in relation to a text, filling the gaps that the author leaves with guesses, discussion, and fans’ own production. This production implies a constant give and take from both the fans and the fandom, forming a gift economy where the fans give their products, be they fanworks, discussion, infrastructure or others, and receive the products of other fans as part of the fandom (Turk 2014). This production, as we already mentioned, appears both as resistance towards hegemony and also as a part of the same (van de Goor 2015). In our study it is important to note that we will work with the concepts of hegemony and resistance as components and results of power relationships. According to Ibañez (1983), they relate to a decentralized power, which no longer resides in one person or institution, but exist as a dissemination constituted, reproduced, and transformed by each everyday interaction. They might be viewed as total possibilities, but impossible to grasp as a relationship. These power relationships, or social relationships, work around norms and mechanisms of verification, surrounding supposed knowledge and truths to compose the instances 13 Otherness: Essays and Studies 6.1 of the definition of hegemony and resistance, without certainty about the result of the interactions. Therefore, in our case, hegemony and resistance will be products of these relationships and be defined in their everyday presences, according to the discursive and non-discursive practices present in fandom. As a consequence, when regarding fandom as a community, which would be a group formed either by practices (community of practices) or shared beliefs (imaginary community) (van de Goor 2015; Leverich 2015), it is important to note how, even in the most closed and minimal group of fans, there will be fissures and divisions due to discordances in practices or beliefs, turning a seemingly homogeneous community into a divided one. These possible divisions have often been dismissed by scholars, who instead suggest that there is one sole and all- encompassing fandom of certain products (Leverich 2015; van de Goor 2015). This is mostly due to the fact that practices are policed and agreed upon by members, as well as disregarded, disagreed or ignored; ships2 can split fans into different ‘factions’ which do not necessarily cross paths, and crossover fandoms are liminal by definition in their activity, which can also set them apart from other fandoms (Leverich 2015). Thus, even while considering that fandom shares beliefs concerning what fan behavior is, what a community is and the sense of belonging therein, their practices contribute to othering and segmenting (van de Goor 2015), constituting communities when those sectors have "their own sets of boundaries, rules and hierarchical structures that may not necessarily conform to the wider fan community" (Chin 2010, p.119). In particular, one subset of fanworks and the community that surrounds it has been used to illustrate the capacity to produce non-hegemonic discourses of fandom and the articulation that occurs therein. Slash is a branch of fanworks 2 Romantic or sexual relationship between two or more fictional or non-fictional characters, canonical or not (definition from shipping wikia). It is usually coded as Character 1/Character 2 or Character1xCharacter2. 14 Vulnerability and Trash Alen Ríos and Diego Rivera focusing on same-gender romantic/sexual relationships between characters. Sometimes the definition excludes lesbian relationships, making them part of a different sub-genre called femslash (Thurman 2015, Brennan 2013b). Slash traditionally has been conceptualized as a feminized space, for example to Jenkins ([1992] 2005) slash appeared as a primarily women activity that served to conceptualize romantic relationships outside of a heteropatriarchal regime. This was done by using the romantic relationship of two men as a way to blur the limitations of masculinity and its relationship with femininity; creating a relationship where both characters are equal. Such conceptualizations, which define slash as the creation of fictional spaces as a critique of a patriarchal society, have been adopted by many authors, who take slash as a strategy to blur the boundary between women and men subjects in a multiplicity of combinations (Willis 2016); or conceptualize it as a “place of female queer possibility”, arguing that the elements of their narratives and the community that forms around slash allow the articulation of queer identities (Lothian, Busse & Reid 2016). On the other hand, Brennan (2013b) discusses that scholars have focused too much on the critical side of slash and the women in it, shunning both the existence of men slashers and the conservative elements (Brennan 2013a) that exist inside slash communities, in particular how certain users attack producers of content if they cross certain boundaries, either of content or visibility. For Brennan (ibid), slash cannot be understood exclusively as a transgressive space as he finds that certain parts of it are rooted more in the fantasy of gay relationships than in the relationships